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Introduction

The moment I figured out that Storage Live Migration (in certain scenarios) and Shared Nothing Live Migration leverage SMB 3.0 and as such Multichannel and RDMA in Windows Server 2012 I was hooked. I just couldn’t let go of the concept of leveraging RDMA for those scenarios. Let me show you the value of my current favorite network design for some demanding Hyper-V environments. I was challenged a couple of time on the cost/port of this design which is, when you really think of it, a very myopic way of calculating TCO/ROI. Really it is. And this week at TechEd North America 2013 Microsoft announced that all types of Live Migrations support Multichannel & RDMA (next to compression) in Windows Server 2012 R2. Watch that in action at minute 39 over here at Understanding the Hyper-V over SMB Scenario, Configurations, and End-to-End Performance. You should have seen the smile on my face when I heard that one! Yes standard Live Migration now uses multiple NIC (no teaming) and RDMA for lightning fast VM mobility & storage traffic. People you will hit the speed boundaries of DDR3 memory with this! The TCO/ROI of our plans just became even better, just watch the session.

So why might I use more than two 10Gbps NIC ports in a team with converged networking for Hyper-V in Windows 2012? It’s a great solution for sure and a combined bandwidth of 2*10Gbps is more than what a lot of people have right now and it can handle a serious workload. So don’t get me wrong, I like that solution. But sometimes more is asked and warranted depending on your environment.

The reason for this is shown in the picture below. Today there is no more limit on the VM mobility within a data center. This will only become more common in the future.

This is not just a wet dream of virtualization engineers, it serves some very real needs. Of cause it does. Otherwise I would not spend the money. It consumes extra 10Gbps ports on the network switches that need to be redundant as well and you need to have 10Gbps RDMA capable cards and DCB capable switches. So why this investment? Well I’m designing for very flexible and dynamic environments that have certain demands laid down by the business. Let’s have a look at those.

The Road to Continuous Availability

All maintenance operations, troubleshooting and even upgraded/migrations should be done with minimal impact to the business. This means that we need to build for high to continuous availability where practical and make sure performance doesn’t suffer too much, not noticeably anyway. That’s where the capability to live migrate virtual machines of a host, clustered or not, rapidly and efficiently with a minimal impact to the workload on the hosts involved comes into play.

Dynamics Environments won’t tolerate downtime

We also want to leverage our resources where and when they are needed the most. And the infrastructure for the above can also be leveraged for that. Storage live migration and even Shared Nothing Live Migration can be used to place virtual machine workloads where they are getting the resources they need. You could see this as (dynamically) optimizing the workload both within and across clusters or amongst standalone Hyper-V nodes. This could be to a SSD only storage array or a smaller but very powerful node or cluster in regards to CPU, memory and Disk IO. This can be useful in those scenarios where scientific applications, number crunching or IOPS intesive software or the like needs them but only for certain times and not permanently.

Future proofing for future storage designs

Maybe you’re an old time fiber channel user or iSCSI rules your current data center and Windows Server 2012 has not changed that. But that doesn’t mean it will not come. The option of using a Scale Out File Server and leverage SMB 3.0 file shares to providing storage for Hyper-V deployments is a very attractive one in many aspects. And if you build the network as I’m doing you’re ready to switch to SMB 3.0 without missing a heart beat. If you were to deplete the bandwidth x number of 10Gbps can offer, no worries you’ll either use 40Gbps and up or Infiniband. If you don’t want to go there … well since you just dumped iSCSI or FC you have room for some more 10Gbps ports

Future proofing performance demands

Solutions tend to stay in place longer than envisioned and if you need some long levity and a stable, standard way of doing networking, here it is. It’s not the most economical way of doing things but it’s not as cost prohibitive as you think. Recently I was confronted again with some of the insanities of enterprise IT. A couple of network architects costing a hefty daily rate stated that 1Gbps is only for the data center and not the desktop while even arguing about the cost of some fiber cable versus RJ45 (CAT5E). Well let’s look beyond the North – South traffic and the cost of aggregating band all the way up the stack with shall we? Let me tell you that the money spent on such advisers can buy you in 10Gbps capabilities in the server room or data center (and some 1Gbps for the desktops to go) if you shop around and negotiate well. This one size fits all and the ridiculous economies of scale “to make it affordable” argument in big central IT are not always the best fit in helping the customers. Think a little bit outside of the box please and don’t say no out of habit or laziness!

Conclusion

In some future blog post(s) we’ll take a look at what such a network design might look like and why. There is no one size fits all but there are not to many permutations either. In our latest efforts we had been specifically looking into making sure that a single rack failure would not bring down a cluster. So when thinking of the rack as a failure domain we need to spread the cluster nodes across multiple racks in different rows. That means we need the network to provide the connectivity & capability to support this, but more on that later.

Introduction

SMB Direct RoCE Does Not Work Without DCB/PFC. “Yes”, you say, “we know, this is well documented. Thank you.” but before you sign of hear me out.

Recently I plugged to RoCE cards into some test servers and linked them to a couple of 10Gbps switches. I did some quick large file copy testing and to my big surprise RDMA kicked in with stellar performance even before I had installed the DCB feature, let alone configure it. So what’s the deal here. Does it work without DCB? Does the card fail back to iWarp? Highly unlikely. I was expecting it to fall back to plain vanilla 10Gbps and not being used at all but it was. A short shout out to Jose Barreto to discuss this helped clarify this.

DCB/PFC is a requirement RoCE

The more busy the network gets the faster the performance will drop. Now in our test scenario we had two servers for a total of 4 RoCE ports on the network consisting of a beefy 48 port 10Gbps switches. So we didn’t see the negative results of this here.

DCB (Data Center Bridging) and Priority Flow Control are considered a requirement for any kind of RoCE deployment. RDMA with RoCE operates at the Ethernet layer. That means there is no overhead from TCP/IP, which is great for performance. This is the reason you want to use RDMA actually. It also means it’s left on it’s own to deal with Ethernet-level collisions and errors. For that it needs DCB/PFC other wise you’ll run into performance issues due to a ton of retries at the higher network layers.

The reason that iWarp doesn’t require DCB/PCF is that it works at the TCP/IP level also offloaded by using a TCP/IP stack on the NIC instead of the OS. So errors are handled by TCP/IP at a cost: iWarp results in the same benefits as RoCE but it doesn’t scale that well. Not that iWarp performance is lousy, far form! Mind you, for bandwidth management reasons,you’d be better of using DCB or some form of QoS as well.

Conclusion

So no, not configuring DCB on your servers and the switches isn’t an option, but apparently it isn’t blocked either so beware of this. It might appear to be working fine but it’s a bad idea. Also don’t think it defaults back to iWarp mode, it doesn’t, as one card does one thing not both. There is no shortcut. RoCE RDMA does not work error free out of the box so you do have the install the DCB feature and configure it together with the switches.

You can fine tune things if and when needed (only do this when this is really the case) but let’s look at this feature in action.

So let’s look at this in real life. For this test we have 2 * X520 DA 10Gbps ports using 10.10.180.8X/24 IP addresses and 2 * Mellanox 10Gbps RDMA adaptors with 10.10.180.9X/24 IP addresses. No teaming involved just multiple NIC ports. Do not that these IP addresses are on different subnet than the LAN of the servers. Basically only the servers can communicate over them, they don’t have a gateway, no DNS servers and are as such not registered in DNS either (live is easy for simple file sharing).

Let’s try and copy a 50Gbps fixed VHDX file from server1 to server2 using the DNS name of the target host (pixelated), meaning it will resolve to that host via DNS and use the LAN IP address 10.10.100.92/16 (the host name is greyed out). In the below screenshot you see that the two RDMA capable cards are put into action. The servers are not using the 1Gbps LAN connection. Multichannel looked at the options:

A 1Gbps RSS capable Link

Two 10Gbps RSS capable Links

Two 10Gbps RDMA capable links

Multichannel concluded the RDMA card is the best one available and as we have two of those it use both. In other words it works just like described.

Even if we try to bypass DNS and we copy the files explicitly via the IP address (10.10.180.84) assigned to the Intel X520 DA cards Multichannel intelligence detects that it has two better cards that provide RDMA available and as you can see it uses the same NICs as in the demo before. Nifty isn’t it

If you want to see the other NICs in action we can disable the Mellanox card and than Multichannel will choose the two X520 DA cards. That’s fine for testing but in real life you need a better solution when you need to manually define what NICs can be used. This is done using PowerShell (take a look at Jose Barrto’s blog The basics of SMB PowerShell, a feature of Windows Server 2012 and SMB 3.0 for more info).

This tells a server it can only use these two NICs which in this example are the two Intel X520 DA 10Gbps cards to access Server2. So basically you configure/tell the client what to use for SMB 3.0 traffic to a certain server. Note the difference in send/receive traffic between RDMA/Native 10Gbps.

On Server1, the client you see this:

On Server2, the server you see this:

Which is indeed the constraint set up as we can verify with:

Get-SmbMultichannelConstraint

We’re done playing so let’s clean up all the constraints:

Get-SmbMultichannelConstraint | Remove-SmbMultichannelConstraint

Seeing this technology it’s now up to the storage industry to provide the needed capacity and IOPS I a lot more affordable way. Storage Spaces have knocked on your door, that was the wake up call . In an environment where we throw lots of data around we just love SMB 3.0

Shared Nothing Live Migration

By now most of you must have heard about the Shared Nothing Live Migration capabilities introduced with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. If not I suggest you check it out over here and then come back here for some extra insights in how it works.

Shared Nothing Live Migration is not magic however. It is made possible by the fact that it relies on some of the new capabilities SMB 3.0 in Windows Server 2012 brought us. Once you know this you also realize that this can be quite fast. The reason for this is that you can design your the network for Shared Nothing Live Migration with 10Gbps or higher, Multi Channel and RDMA for unprecedented throughput. Yup , if you invest in setting up networking right the remaining bottle neck might be the amount of storage IO you can handle whilst reading from the source and writing to the target, or the CPU load you put o your host. Windows will protect you from draining your host beyond reason by the way.

Making Shared Nothing Live Migration Work

You need to set if up of course and do it right. Here’s a list of steps you need to do / check on every Hyper-V host involved.

Enable incoming and outgoing live migrations on all involved Hyper-V host otherwise it will not work. If your host are part of a cluster this is taken care of for you.

Select an authentication protocol (CredSSP or Kerberos) Kerberos authentication allows you to Live Migrate VMs without having to login to the source host’s server itself. Kerberos authentication does require you to configure constrained delegation in Active Directory (don’t go for "Trust this computer for delegation to any services". Follow the principle of least privileges possible.

Set the number of Simultaneous Live Migrations. Experiment with the best value for you environment. Test a little what’s

Set the networks(s) for incoming Live Migrations. It’s best to design this and not just use any network.

Constraint Delegation

Shared Nothing Live Migration needs some prep work security wise before it will work. In Active directory you need to set up so constraint delegation permissions. To some people the concept of constraint delegation is brand new but if you’ve been deploying multi tiered web applications in your environment before this is a cookie you’ve dealt with many times before. It’s the same approach you need to get a web client using Windows Authentication to talk via an IIS web app or service to a SQL Server database and/or read file data from somewhere you’ve been configured this plenty of times.

Use an account to perform the Shared Nothing Live Migration that has administrator privileges on all computers that are involved. While you can use groups in AD to make your live and permission management easier when it comes to granting Share permissions & NTFS rights on folders it doesn’t work that way with constraint delegation. Groups can not be used here so you’ll need to use individual accounts. PowerShell scripting here can help lessen the work if you have many hyper-v hosts involved. In large environments (up to 64 nodes!) this inundates the constraint delegations tab with computer names, so PowerShell really is your friend here.

On each computer object you need to set the delegation permissions for the CIFS and the Microsoft Virtual System Migration Service to all other computers you want to involve in Shared Nothing Live Migration as a source or a target.

IMPORTANT! Hey why do we need CIFS constraint delegation here? Well indeed because Shared Nothing Live Migration under the hood leverages SMB 3.0. It creates a temporary file share on the target to get the job done ! So once you realize that Shared Nothing Live Migration uses SMB 3.0 shares to do it’s magic it than becomes obvious why these constraint delegation permissions for CIFS in active directory are needed.

Visualizing the SMB 3.0 share in action

At the source server (ZULU) we run after starting the Shared Nothing Live Migration and see that we have a connection to a share o the target server. That share is named after the source server with an ID like ZULU.3341302342$. So it’s a hidden share.

On the target server we run Get-SmbSession | fl and see that indeed the source computer has two sessions open on target server.

Let’s see if a share is created using Get-SmbShare.on the target. Yes there is:

In Computer Management it shows up like this on the target sever:

In explorer you can see this as a $VSM$ folder in the root of C, that has a subfolder with the name of the source server and an ID like ZULU.2541288334$. This subfolder is shared (hidden) and contains a shortcut to the volume where the selected target folder resides, this could be C, D local storage (DAS), shared storage (CSV) or an SMB 3.0 share as well. In the screen shot below the folder doesn’t match up to the share name as they are taking from different Shared Nothing Live Migration

Security wise we’re to keep our hands of and the security settings reflect this . But if you take ownership you can co peak at what’s in there. When writing a blog post for example We indeed saw the copied disk size of the VM being live migrated increase in the selected target folder.

Conclusion

I find it pretty cool to see how this all works under the hood. Hope you found this educational and interesting as well. It’s a testimonial to what SMB 3.0 can be leveraged for all kind of interesting scenarios.